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THe PenPal Schools BLOG

Students and teachers around the world are getting ready for a much-needed break! Let us help you start your holiday faster by enrolling in a global collaborative project starting in 2018. You can enroll your students this week and be ready to go when you come back to school in January!

This holiday season, celebrate traditions in your own community as well as other international holidays in PenPal Schools’ newest project, Holidays & Festivals of the World. In addition to this new project, we’re offering other short-term projects that can be completed in as little as one week.

This October has been the biggest ever for our global community - over 30,000 students have connected to learn with PenPals around the world! With more great projects starting every Monday in November, there are more opportunities to connect and collaborate.

Have you tried PenPal Schools new STEAM projects? We now offer great projects for your students to learn about science, technology, engineering, art, and math together with PenPals from around the world! Check out some of our upcoming STEAM projects to take your STEAM program global!

Every day, people of color face discrimination in the United States. Thanks to social and political movements like #BlackLivesMatter and the Take-a-Knee protest by NFL athletes, students across the United States continue to ask questions about race and equality. To help our community of educators support these conversations, PenPal Schools has designed a new project to help students discuss race and racism in the United States.

The Race in America project begins by providing theoretical and historical context. Students learn about concepts such as identity and bias while reflecting on their own lives and communities. They then study the institution of slavery and how racial prejudice was a tool used to control people of color. The project continues through the 19th and 20th centuries where students examine systems and laws that disenfranchised people of color. The project concludes in the 21st century where students learn about systems that continue to have a disproportionately negative impact on people of color in the United States.

This week we celebrate a classroom in Sweden that recently participated in Facts, Opinions, and Fake News. Students in Lotta Kilic’s classes, 9a and 9b, learned about how to evaluate sources and how “fake news” impacts communities around the world.

Check out some of their responses below and read more about what the students in Ms. Kilic’s classes had to say about their experience learning with PenPals. Facts, Opinions, and Fake News starts again Monday, October 2. Sign up today!

The biggest PenPal exchange of 2017 is coming! Classrooms from 23 countries including India, Colombia, the Netherlands, Uruguay, Sweden, the United States, and more have already enrolled. To participate simply enroll in our most popular global project, World Explorer starting October 2. Enroll by Wednesday, September 20 to get an invitation to the exclusive PenPal Fest Kickoff Party!

Are you looking for ways to get students excited about topics like Earth Science, Technology, and Math? PenPal Schools is excited to introduce new STEM projects! Now your students can connect with PenPals from around the world to participate in collaborative math challenges, study robotics and meteorology, and get excited about careers in technology!​These projects are coming up soon, so sign up today to get PenPals for your students!

Learn about how meteorologists predict the weather for communities around the world in Meteorology & Weather, starting Monday, September 4. Hurry and enroll your students by Friday, September 1 in order to participate in this project!

Did you know that over 80% of middle schoolers can’t tell the difference between a news article and sponsored content on social media? This problem doesn’t just affect students in America. We’ve heard from teachers all around the world who want to help their students identify fake news, which is why we’ve created our newest project Facts, Opinions, and Fake News.

In one of our newest projects, PenPals have been learning about food and culinary traditions around the world. Join the biggest PenPal project of the season by participating in A World of Food starting Monday, July 17!

Invite your friends and colleagues to enroll their students and participate in the biggest global collaboration project this July. This great collaborative project inspires students to reflect on their own food communities as they learn about how food impacts people around the world.

Teachers and students must enroll before July 17 to participate, and the project can be completed in as little as one hour between July 17-23. You can meet other teachers from around the world who are participating in the Global Teacher Forum!

Teachers love how easy it is to design lessons and units around PenPal Schools projects, which are aligned to a variety of standards and are available at different reading levels. With weekly lessons that include everything from videos, readings, and vocabulary to discussion questions, downloadable activities, and built-in assessment tools, you can go ahead and cut your summer planning time in half!

The wait is finally over! We are excited to introduce two new projects, La Comida Latina and La Cultura Latina, available exclusively to PenPal PLUS subscribers! Both projects are entirely in Spanish and can be completed in one week.

Hello global educators! We’ve got many free global projects available this month, including some new shorter projects that can be completed in as little as one week! It’s never been easier to incorporate collaborative global projects into your classroom.

To celebrate Earth day and the end of the school year, we’re organizing the biggest PenPal exchange ever! From May 8th to 12th, students from around the world will join forces for the environment!​In our new 1 week project, Joining Forces for the Environment, students will think globally and act locally. Students will learn with PenPals around the world about topics like freshwater supply, deforestation and climate change. They’ll then identify an environmental issue affecting their own communities and work together to complete a project designed to make a positive impact.

We know how hard it can be to make time for long projects at the end of the school year. That’s why PenPal Schools has introduced new PenPal projects that can be completed in 4 weeks, 3 weeks, or even in less than a single week!​We’ve made these new projects short enough to fit into your busy end-of-the-year schedule, and we’ve emphasized project-based learning to keep students engaged even as summer approaches.

Pakistan is one of the most misunderstood countries on Earth. Students (and adults) often form perceptions about Pakistan based on what they see in the news, which frequently includes violence and political instability while offering little insight into the country's rich history and culture.​PenPal Schools' newest project, “VR Field Trip to Pakistan,” seeks to address this problem by enabling students to explore Pakistan like never before. On the invitation of the Pakistani Government, PenPal Schools has filmed Virtual Reality video content throughout the ancient city of Lahore, in the Punjab province of Pakistan. Through incredibly immersive VR “field trips,” students from around the world will connect with online PenPals to experience the bustling streets, ancient forts, and stunning mosques of Lahore. They’ll also get a glimpse of Pakistan’s rich culture, arts, food, and traditions - all while improving their reading, writing, and technology skills.

Teachers can sign up for free and invite their students to enroll before PenPal Match Day on March 20.

Of course, no PenPal Schools project would be complete without PenPals, so we’ve teamed up with the All Pakistan Private Schools Federationso that students around the world can learn with PenPals from across Pakistan! The federation represents over 197,000 schools and 20 million students from every province in Pakistan, so there should be plenty of Pakistani PenPals to go around!

A student from Beaconhouse Newlands school in Lahore, Pakistan enjoys a preview of the VR Field Trip

​Have you ever noticed all the flags you and your students see every day? From national, state, and municipal flags, to university flags, business flags, athletic flags, and flags that champion social causes, you can learn a lot about communities by studying the flags they create and choose to display.

2016 has been an election year like no other. As election rhetoric intensifies and anticipation builds, how can we engage students thoughtfully? One way is by teaching students issues at the center of the election in an unbiased manner. Another is to put student voice at the center of instruction. PenPal Schools’ Decision 2016 project does both by connecting students from across the country to share perspectives on these important national issues!

​We are all connected by our environment. We depend on natural resources for the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the energy we use. The great diversity and possibility of Earth is truly awe-inspiring! Ideally every student would have the opportunity to experience the similarities and differences of our planet’s ecosystems first hand: to visit the Great Barrier Reef or hike alongside rhino’s in their South African habitat, for example. This may not be possible for every student, but thanks to technology, students and their peers around the world students can now learn together about Earth and our shared challenge of protecting it.

We're turning the Presidential election into a learning opportunity with our latest newest course: Decision 2016. This free course helps K12 students of all abilities study and share issues at the center of the upcoming presidential election. Each week, students watch original videos, read nonpartisan articles and share their thoughts with a PenPal from across the country!